Forget Flags – Which Other Festival Behaviour Should Be Banned?

Reading and Leeds boss Melvin Benn has banned flags from this year’s event. Booo! He also wants to clamp down on crowd-surfing. Double boo!

Talk about ruining our fun. What next, Sergeant Buzz Kill? A ban on incinerating Portaloos and rioting? The kids will never stand for it.

More to the point, why get worked up about petty issues like flags when there are so many other aspects of the festival experience that deserve to be outlawed. Like these, for starters:

1. Children
It’s the curse of the modern dance tent: rows of pushchairs shunted against the mixing desk while mum and dad reach for the lasers. It’s undignified. Face it: you’ve got kids now, the fun’s over. So put those drugs away and get little Rufus back in the Saab.

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4. Any area that calls itself ‘Where The Wild Things Are’
This is false advertising, given that any enclosure with an enigmatic, hippyish name like this – far from containing the promised all-night debauchery – invariably contains a stoned bloke playing bongos, and a wizened crone selling chai in chipped mugs for £3 a pop.

5. James Morrison
Or Newton Faulkner, or Paolo Nutini, or Daniel Merriweather – or any other male artist-with-a-faux-soulful-catch-in-their-voice that Rufus Hound might describe as “fantastic” before cutting to edited highlights of The Fratellis.